Railway communications are closely impacted by the evolution and availability of new\nwireless communication technologies. Traditionally, the critical nature of railway services, the long\nlifecycle of rolling stock, and their certification processes challenge the adoption of the latest\ncommunication technologies. A current railway telecom trend to solve this problem is to design\na flexible and adaptable communication architecture that enables the detachment of the railway\nservices-at the application layer-and the access technologies underneath, such as 5G and beyond.\nOne of the enablers of this detachment approach is software-defined networking (SDN)-included in\n5G architecture-due to its ability to programmatically and dynamically control the network behavior\nvia open interfaces and abstract lower-level functionalities. In this paper, we design a novel railway\ntrain-to-ground (T2G) communication architecture based on the 5G technological enabler SDN and\non the transport-level redundancy technique multipath TCP (MPTCP). The goal is to provide an\nadaptable and multitechnology communication service while enhancing the network performance of\ncurrent systems. MPTCP offers end-to-end (E2E) redundancy by the aggregation of multiple access\ntechnologies, and SDN introduces path diversity to offer a resilient and reliable communication.\nWe carry out simulation studies to compare the performance of the legacy communication architecture\nwith our novel approach. The results demonstrate a clear improvement in the failover response time\nwhile maintaining and even improving the uplink and downlink overall data rates.
Loading....